Giants to Hold Intrasquad Scrimmages
No preseason games, no problem.
Giants head coach Joe Judge, who continues to seek ways to ready the team and his staff for the upcoming season, revealed he will hold weekly intrasquad scrimmages starting on Friday, August 21.
“Look, for everyone kind of familiar with football, that will look a whole lot like every high school and college scrimmage in America. Offense on one sideline, defense on the other. We’ll create situations on the field and let them play live football all the way through.
“We have to get an opportunity to let our guys play at full speed. Let them go out there and experience the game and demonstrate they can operate when coaches aren’t yelling in their ears and trying to make corrections. We just have to get them out there and let them play.”
When combined with the league-wide rules regarding how many consecutive days teams can hold fully padded practices, the timing of the scrimmages would seem to come close to jiving with the last three weeks of preseason games initially scheduled for the Giants that were wiped out.
The scrimmages will not only give the Giants a chance to engage in full-scale football activities, it will also allow for Judge’s coaching staff to establish how they can best operate on game day.
It will also allow the team to test out the new schemes the coaches have been working to put in place since the spring. Up until this point, the players have been working individually in groups, but starting Friday, they will work against each other.
Best of all, this can all be accomplished in the "privacy" of the Giants' practice environment. Judge and his staff can control the script and tempo of the scrimmage and they won't necessarily have to worry about the rest of the league being able to access film on guys that the Giants are hoping to slip through to the expanded practice squad.
“I hope to see an improvement and a level of intensity from everyone on the field,” Judge said. “Look, we’re going to be moving at a fast pace come Friday, and then again on Sunday when we come back from the day off.
“They’re going to be moving fast, we’re going to be intent, we’re going to have an intensity in how we work. When the padded practices start on Monday, it will reduce to a 90-minute practice per league rules. We’re going to build everyone to make sure that now that we’re in pads, we can execute with the right fundamentals to play aggressive but safe."
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